Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia

Cinematics, Pointless Nostalgia

A Thousand Clowns and Shep-Colored Glasses

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thousandclowns.jpgIn a recent edition of The Sound of Young America, Jesse Thorn interviewed Barry Gordon, who starred in A Thousand Clowns in its Broadway and Hollywood incarnations (1962 and 1965, respectively) as a young man. The play ran for years in New York, and the film was a big hit that won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Martin Balsam. (It was also nominated for Best Picture, among other categories.)

Nowadays, it’s a fairly obscure film, not in print in any home video format. Its general availability has hovered between “not” and “barely” for the last 30 years or so. Every now and then, you can catch  A Thousand Clowns on Turner Classic Movies, although if you blink you might miss it.

Listening to the interview with Gordon reminded me not only of how much I love this movie, but of how I first heard of this film: My longtime obsession with Jean Shepherd, who himself was obsessed with A Thousand Clowns, though in a not-quite-healthy way.

Some quick background for those in need of it (those who don’t, feel free to skip ahead a paragraph or two) Jean Shepherd is best known for writing and narrating A Christmas Story, but my love of him has more to with his radio show, which aired on WOR in New York from 1955 to 1977. It’s hard to encapsulate exactly what he did on the radio; something in the Venn intersection of improvised monologue, storytelling, and sardonic commentary on the day’s events. It was done completely off the top of his head, with no notes, outlines, or anything. It is better experienced than described, so I’d encourage the curious to check out some of my Shep-related posts, or The Brass Figlagee, a podcast that makes available hundreds of his old shows.

When he came to New York in the mid-1950s, Shepherd had an overnight show that garnered a huge following among jazz artists, writers, and other Night People (a phrase he claimed to have coined, and just may have). By his definition, a Night Person was someone who probably had a day job to get up for in the morning but preferred to stay up into the wee hours, just brooding, because they were “bugged” about some inexplicable something. His monologues were a stab at trying to get at that something.

At that time, among his many pals in the nocturnal, creative set was the future author of A Thousand Clowns, Herb Gardner. They appeared together in a neo-vadevillian revue, Look, Charlie: A Short History of the Pratfall (which also featured another erstwhile Shepherd BFF and fellow Chicagoan, Shel Silverstein). The exact content of the show has been lost to the mists of time, but peep this page from its program, in which both Shepherd and Gardner are listed with their respective credits. (Also, note the illustrations by Silverstein.)

Shepherd used to promote Gardner’s “Nebbishes” cartoons on his WOR show, embellishing the spots (as he often did to those who dared advertise on the program) with his trademark rambling. Shepherd did not have many guests on his show–he preferred to work solo–but Gardner was one of the few, and he came on the program to promote Nebbishes in person. Gardner in turn wrote the liner notes to Shep’s second LP, Will Failure Spoil Jean Shepherd?

Shortly thereafter, the two men had a falling out, and the reason was almost certainly A Thousand Clowns.

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Baseball, Pointless Nostalgia

My Best Laid Plans

redfoley.jpgAs a kid, I didn’t go to too many baseball games. My family lived a little too far away from the city and had just enough money to not starve, so games involved too large an investment of time and capital. We’d make it out to Shea maybe once a year, inevitably sitting in some of the stadium’s worst seats, way up at the highest reaches of the upper deck. The players looked like pinstriped ants, but I didn’t care. The experience was still special and amazing. I didn’t dream of going any more often, because that seemed so impossible to me

Whenever we went, I’d somehow scrape together enough cash to buy a program and score the game. No one taught me how to do it. I’d learned from Red Foley’s Best Baseball Book Ever, which my grampa gave me one birthday. Once upon a time, Red was the official scorer for the Mets and Yankees. I found the book really interesting, even if Red was unable to get MLB licensing, and all the stickers had bootleg team “logos”.

The last game I went to for a very long time came the day after opening day, 1993. My mom, two brothers, and grampa snuck in chicken cutlet sandwiches and sodas to avoid crushing concession prices. It would be a horrible year for the Mets–The Worst Team Money Could Buy–but we didn’t know that yet. It was also the second game ever played by the Colorado Rockies. They were shut out the day before, so I got to see the first ever Rockie run, home run, and RBI when Dante Bichette went deep against Bret Saberhagen in the seventh. I still was young and dumb enough to consider this Witnessing History. The Mets won anyway, 6-1.

Shea gave away Opening Day Weekend pins with little Mets and Rockies hats on them. I considered it a precious thing and put it with all my other precious things, in the top drawer of my dresser. It stayed there, untouched, forever. Years later, when my grandparents were both gone and I was cleaning out grampa’s dresser, I found the same pin, nestled against watches and retirement gifts.

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NYC, Pointless Nostalgia

A Special Valentine from a Pontiac Full of Mooks

bushwickinlet.jpgOnce upon a time, a long time ago, I got dumped. Then I lost my job. The two events conspired to shatter my already fragile self confidence, and I spent the next year and change eating myself up with self-pity while also fretting about how to not starve. And also, drinking. But never too much to deplete my bank account or deprive me of the ability to look for a new job, which actually made me even more depressed. Wah, I can’t even bottom out right!

I was lucky enough to have friends who tried to drag me out of the house and kickstart my confidence, even when I insisted on wallowing in a pit that other people started but I was doing my damnedest to finish. My friend Chris, in particular, did everything in his power to make sure that if I wasn’t going to snap myself out of it, at least I wouldn’t be alone. We’d

During this particular year, he threw a Valentine’s Day party at his place in the East Village. He insisted I come. I was feeling whiny and sorry for myself and not really in the mood to be outside on That Day. He insisted, promised Girls would be present, and basically threatened that if I didn’t show up, he just might come to Brooklyn and forcibly kick my ass outside. Faced with that option, I reluctantly agreed to go.

Gradually, my dread turned into acceptance, even anticipation. Yes, I should get back out there. Yes, going to a friend’s party will be infinitely better than sitting at home alone. Maybe I’ll meet somebody interesting, and if not, I gave it a shot and that’s worth something.

I dressed myself up in as hip clothes I could manage and hit the streets. It wasn’t super cold out, the G train was unreliable as usual, and I hated the bus with a passion (still do). So I walked from my place in Greenpoint down Franklin Avenue, near the waterfront, on my way to the L train. It wasn’t too late, but the sun had set hours ago. Manhattan glinted off in the distance. I had a split second of hopefulness.

Franklin eventually takes a sharp turn and becomes Kent Avenue, right by an oil refinery and a little inlet. This is approximately where Williamsburg begins. It is at this point that I came across a 1970s vintage American boat-car. Actually, it came across me, speeding up Kent (much easier to do back then, before all the traffic restrictions and bike lanes). It was an aggressively Me Decade shade of avocado green, with a low vinyl roof and an engine that sounded either souped up or painfully clogged.

The car screeched to a halt as it reached me. I kept walking, thinking this was a mere coincidence, but then the driver’s side rolled down a window and bellowed HEY BUDDY! I turned and saw the car was crammed with a bunch of guys in aviator jackets, the kind skinheads wear, except they all had the type of mustaches favored by cops or professional dirtbags.

They looked identical to me, at least from a distance in the dark. Each one of them had this smirking, leering look on their faces, like everything they said or heard had the potential to be a dirty joke. If I had to guess their favorite leisure activity, my first guess would be Punching. They were mooks, obviously out to have a good time in the most sociopathic way possible.

I already felt like I was being set up to be a punchline in some joke I was not in on. I had an instinct to just keep walking, but ignoring these guys seemed more dangerous than answering them. I was alone on the Brooklyn waterfront, not another soul around. The possibility that I could soon disappear without a trace seemed very real to me. So I responded, “Yeah?”, the way you would throw a mugger your wallet and hope for the best.

“Hey, where are the hookers around here?” the driver said, very matter of factly, like this is something complete strangers ask each other.

I shrugged. “You’re asking the wrong guy,” I said.

“C’mon, you know you pay for ass,” the driver said. Before I could even react, the boat-car screeched off up Kent-Franklin and into the night.

At that moment, I seriously considered just going home. Nobody else in the world saw this, and yet I felt humiliated. I took this as an omen, that nothing good would happen to me this evening. But I went to the party anyway.

I wish I could say that I had fun despite this encounter, but I did not. I kept hearing that mook yell at me in my head, over and over again, like an asshole’s mantra. Eventually, I stopped talking at the party because I was afraid I might repeat it out loud to someone by accident and oh, what hijinks may have ensued from that?

To compensate, I drank way too much, stumbled home, bought some Ben & Jerry’s, and passed out watching Mystery Science Theater 3000. The next morning, the mook-ringing in my ears had faded a bit, but not gone away completely. I thought, “Maybe one day I won’t think about this.”

But a decade later, even as I’m happily married with a kid, it still flares up in my brain every now and then, and I remember that awful, almost childlike mortification I felt at that moment. So when asked the philosophical question, “If someone humiliates you and no one is around to see it, does it still scar you for life?” I say yes, it does.

Happy Valentine’s Day!